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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Mellow Bakers: Brioche (November)

Brioche is not my type of bread. I said that when I made the BBA brioche and again when I made Nick Malgieri's brioche. I'm just not into rich, buttery, breakfasty breads.

But the brioche from Bread . . . oh, my! The best brioche I've ever tasted. Fluffy, buttery, creamy goodness. I made it for tomorrow's dinner of French toast . . . let's just hope it makes it that long!

This is a cold-loving dough. Mix flour, salt, instant yeast with cold eggs, cold water, and cold butter. Let it mix forever. Really, I think it took about twenty minutes in my stand mixer for the butter to incorporate itself into the dough and pass JH's "sheet" test (the same as PR's windowpane?). Then it rose for an hour, was given a fold, and was placed in the fridge for an overnight rest.

This afternoon, I took it out and used PR's directions for shaping. He suggested a one-pound loaf for an 8x4 pan, so that's what I did. I made the rest of the dough (about 10 ounces) into a free-form brioche-a-tete (which ended up partially unraveling in the oven). In retrospect, I should have used all of the dough in my loaf pan; the one pound never filled the pan.

Regardless, the misshapen brioche-a-tete and the mini-sandwich loaf both baked for about fifteen or twenty minutes, made the house smell heavenly, and tasted divine. Who would've thought it? A brioche recipe that I'll definitely be making again!